It is a shame that Harry Nilsson did not live to enjoy his 70th birthday, which falls today. That he got a couple of years beyond 50 was miraculous enough, though, for he was a devoted, legendary-in-his-own-time practitioner of the arts of self-destruction, skilled enough in them to put the fear even in John Lennon, no slouch at such things himself.

As documented in the fine recently released film Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?), Nilsson had settled down in his last years, working hard after the lost decade of the 1970s and long absences from the studio in the 1980s. After the murder of Lennon, he had largely turned from the musical stage—and he was notoriously indifferent to commercial success in any event—and appeared in public mostly to press the cause of gun control. But now he was driven by the loss of most of his already dwindling fortune, earned from a chain of hit records in the 1960s and early ’70s, to an inventive accountant, and he was apparently inspired by a second artistic wind as well.

Alas, Harry Nilsson never made his big comeback, and he died early in 1994. For all that, he remains firmly enshrined in popular culture, mostly for his interpretation of Fred Neil’s haunting song “Everybody’s Talkin’,” which reached #6 on the U.S. pop charts in 1969.

To commemorate his birthday, here’s a televised performance from that year. It’s followed by Nilsson’s novelty song “Coconut” from 1971, performed here in nice if probably accidental homage to Ernie Kovacs’s Nairobi Trio, and by the Pete Ham/Tom Evans (of Badfinger fame) song “Without You,” here taken from a demo session and sung with a raw power that the recorded version—which hit #1 throughout the English-speaking world—only hints at.